Lightning data assimilation scheme in a 4DVAR system and its impact on very short-term convective forecasting

Its performance is evaluated for the very short-term precipitation forecasts of a localized convective event over northeastern China. The lightning DA scheme assimilated pseudo-observations for vertical velocity fields derived from observed total lightning rates and statistically computed vertical velocity profile from VDRAS analysis data.

To reduce representative errors of the derived vertical velocity, a distance-weighted horizontal interpolation is applied to the input data prior to the DA. The case study reveals that although 0-2-h precipitation nowcasts are improved by assimilating lightning data alone compared to CTRL (no radar or lightning) and RAD (radar only), better results are obtained when the lightning data are assimilated with radar data simultaneously.